1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a drawing method for drawing a pattern on a surface of a workpiece, using an exposure drawing apparatus including a plurality of optical modulation elements, and also relates to an exposure drawing apparatus in which the drawing method is executed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a drawing apparatus is used for optically drawing fine patterns and symbols such as characters on the surface of a workpiece. A representative use of the drawing apparatus is for drawing a circuit pattern on a workpiece when a printed circuit board is manufactured using photolithography. In this case, the workpiece may be either a photosensitive film for producing a photomask or a photoresist layer formed on a suitable substrate.
In the conventional drawing apparatus, the image (raster-graphic data) to be exposed on the workpiece, is produced based on vector-graphic data (circuit data) transmitted from a computer using CAD and such like. In this type of drawing method, the drawing resolution is limited by the number of pixels supported with the apparatus. Further, the data-conversion load and data-transmittance load can be heavy because the amount of data must be increased to improve resolution.